These Are the Chains
by Silverfyshxin
Summary: [Oneshot] Sanzo contemplates life, death, destiny and happy endings. [Rated for Sanzo's language. Some 58, but nothing explicit and the focus isn't on them.]


Disclaimer: These ones belong to Minekura.

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**These Are the Chains**

* * *

"You're deaf and blind," Sanzo says, when Goku comes screaming into the room about Gojyo eatin' Hakkai _down there_ Sanzo you gotta come stop him.

He says that after he beat the stupid monkey into the ground with his fan. "I never wanted to know the fucking details," he tells the idiot monkey. "Keep them to yourself."

---

Because Sanzo isn't deaf and blind; he sees red strings everywhere, spinning themselves into twine and rope when the morons aren't watching properly and then the ropes grow stiffer and stronger and they begin to look something like shackles. Red doesn't always mean blood, but that doesn't mean it's a particularly good idea to forget that the stupid fucking strands of so-called destiny are the colour of apples and blood.

Orange and blue aren't the only things that contrast, and there's a _reason_ why women think the idiot kappa is attractive, a reason why blood's red. It stands out, and it's something different. Destiny marks its people with threads of red, and when they turn into manacles weighing them down, the idiots ask, "How did it get so far?" Grow up and take responsibility. _You let it happen_.

---

Sanzo saw them once, by accident. Hakkai was running his fingers through Gojyo's hair, through heavy threads of red. Sanzo doesn't need to be a priest to realise Hakkai has some sort of moronic guilt complex about the colour of blood, doesn't need to be a priest to recognise that one of the reasons Hakkai stays with the kappa is because it fuels his guilt. _I've got no right to be happy,_ Hakkai probably thinks. He doesn't. Happiness isn't a fucking right. Nobody _earns_ happiness. They just think they do.

"I love you," Hakkai said quietly.

"Me too," Gojyo replied, and then he leaned up to kiss Hakkai.

Sanzo turned and left. It makes him sick.

---

"What do you want to do when this's all over?" Goku asks.

Hakkai always gives a different answer, each time someone asks the question. "I want to open a school." "I want to grow a vegetable garden." "I want to live somewhere where no one uses Jeep for training or leaves cigarette burns in the arm rests." And the two animals cringe.

Sanzo just snorts.

Gojyo always gives a flippant answer to these questions, but he looks at Hakkai, and Hakkai looks at him, and it's obvious what they want.

They want a happy ending.

---

There has never been a guarantee that this farce of a road trip will ever end well. For all Sanzo knows, this is just another piece of entertainment for the fucker who's behind the Sanbutsushin. It's up to whoever the hell it is whether it's more fun to leave them alive or to let them die at Gyokumen Kyoshuu's hands.

The only thing Sanzo can be sure of is that he won't go down easily and that the morons can fend for themselves. Happy endings and fucking horseback rides into the sunset were never on the agenda but then again detours to look for idiotic kappas or the other gods-damned sutras hadn't been on the agenda either.

There have been far too many detours. It pisses Sanzo off, so he empties his gun into the space next to the kappa's head.

---

Happy endings are supposed to be special things, Sanzo knows. He's been _told_. It's the kind of shit that's written in red and underlined three times. It's just another red chain that clamps down even worse because some idiot might actually believe that it really does end at happy.

Happy means stability. Stability means the gods don't get their daytime show, and that just isn't fucking allowed.

Happy endings don't go on forever. Endings end. That's why they're called _endings_.

---

"How the hell do you come up with this shit?" the kappa sometimes asks.

"I use my brain, moron, which is more than you do."

That's not altogether true, but hell if Sanzo will tell Gojyo that. Sometimes Sanzo thinks of his master and what his master would do and what his master might have said.

("I just come up with it," his master might have said, or "I see things in the smoke when I smoke my pipe, which is why, Kouryuu, it is a good thing that I smoke." Sanzo isn't quite sure; the words run together in his head along with "I heard a voice." and that just makes Sanzo's head begin to throb the way his master's logic always used to hurt so he leaves it at that.)

---

Koumyou had never lied to his favourite disciple. He had given Sanzo little truths wrapped up in the form of stories. A storyteller's job is to tell the truth with lies, but Kouryuu's master never had. Parables with lessons attached, nothing preachy or pretentious, _that_ had been Koumyou's way of showing the world his view of the truth.

("See the trees, Kouryuu? They look dead."

"Master, they'll be back in the spring."

"In the dead of winter, does the tree see it like that? I like to think not. I'd rather be alive than look bare and leafless.")

That much Sanzo had learned from his master, if he could learn nothing else. Sanzo doesn't preach, doesn't mouth false platitudes. He will not dishonour his master by schooling his attitude to suit his temple's monks, or its patrons. He will not soften the blow with soft words and meaningless pleasantries. But he has learnt, through the course of three decades, that he will never become his master, nor does he want to. Genjo Sanzo remains himself, and because of that he skips straight past the parable to the truth.

("You'll still be here to watch the trees flower again, Master."

"That's true, but I'll be here next winter to watch them dead again.")

There is one thing Sanzo remains thankful of: his master never tacked on meaningless happy endings to his parables. He's not sure if he could have stood the shattering of one more illusion the night his master had died.

---

Because if anyone had deserved a happy ending, it was his master. Koumyou Sanzo had not deserved to end with his guts spilled across the room with red streaks flung across the sliding doors and the floor like so many severed strips of red rope. If life attached any significance to good deeds, Koumyou Sanzo would not have ended the way he had for a scrap of a boy he'd saved from the river thirteen years before.

But life's not a fucking fairytale, and the gods help no one, not even the bearer of two of the Tenchi Kaigen sutras.

Happy endings aren't made to last. They're made to end.

---

That was when Genjo Sanzo, the thirty-first of China, had learnt that red's not just the colour of autumn, or of the little red flowers by the river that his master had shown him as a child.

("Look, Kouryuu, don't they look good, red and brown together side by side? Even the smallest blossom by the side here looks beautiful.")

Kouryuu attended the burial briefly before he left. He saw the solemn faces and the dignified way they left the box his body had been put into. There were flowers, and when he looked to the funerary chrysanthemum, he realised that it was a shade of orange. Then he turned and went.

Contrasts are important. They bring the important details out. Red against white and pale. That was the colour of death against the remains of his master's robes. Red is the colour of destiny's threads, the puppet strings that snap and spray all over the place once the part has been played to its conclusion.

Sometimes red really is just the colour of blood.

---

Happiness is not earned. Happiness is grasped, and if you're strong enough, you can hold onto it for a while, or sometimes you can cheat destiny into believing you're not really happy ad hold onto it that way. But stories have their ends, and happy endings never last. Go on far enough and death will be right there, waiting. It's inevitable, so there's no point in looking for it, but that doesn't mean denying its existence.

That's the only other thing Sanzo is sure of.

"Saaaaaanzo," Goku whines. Sanzo hits him. Bad enough that he has to stay downstairs because the morons upstairs are too noisy, but Goku couldn't sleep either, so he has to babysit the fucking monkey at the same time.

"Kyuu," Jeep says. Sanzo rolls his eyes. All the animals have been turned out of their rooms so the other animals can do whatever shit they're doing right now.

"I'll kill you all," he says.

"Nah," Goku grins. "I'm gonna live anyway!"

Sanzo smacks him again.

"OW! That hurt!"

"What's your point?" Sanzo deadpans, while he looks at Goku's eyes and thinks those are the colour of chrysanthemum. This is what it looks like to have a minute enough brain to grab for happiness and refuse to let go.

("I heard a voice.")

"'S true," Goku mutters sullenly. "I'm gonna live an' live an' live until there's nothin' left t' live for."

Sanzo smacks him with the fan again, mostly to make himself feel better. "You are a stupid monkey," he says. Red strings, he thinks, and squashes the thought savagely.

He hits Goku again.

* * *

Chrysanthemums are the flowers of death, or they symbolise death. They have something to do with death in Chinese culture.

I kind of fail at my culture.

For I have gorged myself on Sandman and resemblance, if any, and there are huge honking ones, are not coincidental. Look, it's a good line.


End file.
